ALIVE IN THE ICE AND FIRE
A Conversation
August, 2018
SUSAN STEWART As I read your books, including If You Have to Go, I am struck, as I’m sure any reader would be, by their existential immediacy. You write in time as you undergo time, taking up especially the unfolding of events under great forces of nature or state power. Your poems often emerge at the intersection of individual and collective suffering, including the suffering in your own life. To read your books in sequence is to engage, in myriad contexts, with issues of theodicy. I would like to know more about your sense of poetry as, at times, almost a ritual solace, a kind of lighting of a candle or gift of structure, and, at other times, as a plagued song—a practice with its own dangers.
KATIE FORD I do tend to write when I’m undergoing some kind of disturbance or pain, and the writing doesn’t begin in knowledge (for me, it’s emotion that drives me to write), so the immediacy arrives via the unsettling that’s compelling me to make a poem. But the writing then does, as you say, have its own dangers, as it’s perilously unpredictable, and my earliest lines are often undone by realizations that are destructive toward what those lines first thought they knew. Sudden revelation is a kind of death for the thinking it consumes. So, in terms of solace, it’s not that. But there is an element—when form and subject organically and simultaneously fuse—that is ecstatic. So it’s at a higher pitch than solace.
I’ve been struck this week by your sequence from The Forest, “Slaughter,” and keep thinking of how your poetry often belongs to a tradition that asks a reader to undergo—as closely as possible—the condition that the human, or here, the animal, had to undergo. I felt an ethical obligation to remain inside of this remarkable sequence, despite how much the slaughter repulsed me. I wonder what you might say about suffering and poetry’s obligation to look. To, in Susan Sontag’s language, “regard the pain of others.” And, of course, the ethical limits on such looking.
SS I hope we can keep thinking about the kinds of knowledge produced by writing poems and, above all, the importance of insights that arise in the process of making, but I’d first like to say something in thanks to your response to “Slaughter.” As a child I always hid in my room on slaughtering day while the adults went about the many tasks it involved; it was a Fall event at my grandparents’ farm, and everyone approached it with a somber sense that Winter was coming and this was the last harvest, after a summer of growing and storing food. Then I came to wonder, years later,
